Steam's monthly hardware and software survey, which tracks the specs of gamers' PCs and laptops, shows that 16GB VRAM GPUs and 8-core CPUs are now the most common options for systems.
“Most common” (i.e. statistical mode) is often such a misleading thing to pay attention to because it’s so sensitive to how the person doing the study chooses to group things. For example, also on the Steam Hardware Survey, it looks like Arch is more popular than Ubuntu, but that’s because Arch (being a rolling release) is only one entry, while Ubuntu is separated out into versions.
Similarly, “16GB is most common” is easily confused with “most people have 16GB,” which is very much not true. It’s just that the majority, which is less than 16GB, is divided between people with 4, 8, 12, etc.
Life is complicated, so summarising such things into a single number or a sentence comes with compromises. People just love to generalise and categorise things, no matter how feasible that really is. These summaries just scratch a very specific itch people seem to have.
“Most common” (i.e. statistical mode) is often such a misleading thing to pay attention to because it’s so sensitive to how the person doing the study chooses to group things. For example, also on the Steam Hardware Survey, it looks like Arch is more popular than Ubuntu, but that’s because Arch (being a rolling release) is only one entry, while Ubuntu is separated out into versions.
Similarly, “16GB is most common” is easily confused with “most people have 16GB,” which is very much not true. It’s just that the majority, which is less than 16GB, is divided between people with 4, 8, 12, etc.
Yeah, but once was 4GB, then 8GB and now 16GB, without any group being held by most people.
Its the leading group. It shows the transition.
Life is complicated, so summarising such things into a single number or a sentence comes with compromises. People just love to generalise and categorise things, no matter how feasible that really is. These summaries just scratch a very specific itch people seem to have.